Hockney on photography's failings

[SergeiR]

Was in London last week, went for second time to the Hockney show at RA ( first in january)
I'd say its a must if you are in London, and although not photography Hockney is definitely a (the?) major living artist of the photo/ digital age.
Much of the latest work drawn on an IPad and then made wall size.
My daughter who is head of art at a major UK school was with me , she believes he is the Monet of our time, but as ever many won't see this until he's gone........

Be as it may. I doesnt strike me as anything like that, but its out of scope for the forum anyway. I am not art buyer by all means. But i did went to art school since i was wyn, so may be i got spoiled.

[Drew Wiley]

Sometimes folks like Hockney get a bully pulpit just because they are successful painters;
but I'm of the impression he never really understood photography as an independent media. But I've never been entusiastic about highbrow British foppery anyway.

[Darin Boville]

Hockney has a warm place in me heart after his recent commentary on the Hirst dot paintings.

--Darin

[Drew Wiley]

I think Hirst is interesting the way he simplifies the rules of the game, and then is absolutely brilliant the way he modulates subtle variations in hue and tonality in the dot
matrix. There was a recent interview with him where he made no attempt to hide the fact
that he was playing a Warhol redux, that is, manufactured fame. That whole mindset makes me sick. But it has taken him to the bank. But what do I know. I'm admittedly a
hillbilly who hates opera, ballet, and champagne. I'd rather be out thrashing thru the weeds with my Ries.

[Maris Rusis]

David Hockney's disappointment with photography comes, I think, from not really understanding the fundamental challenge of the medium. By photography I mean making pictures out of light-sensitive materials. Put simply photographs do not match the pictures our brain presents to our consciousness when we look at things. This has been a major source of disappointment from the very beginning and it dismays Hockney even now.

What's going on? Remember, the mind blends multiple images acquired during rapid eye movements called saccades. This is "image stitching" par excellence.
Eye based images containing deep shadow detail are blended in the brain with images of what is in the highlights. This is HDR par excellence.
Finally the picture in our mind's eye is also composited from what we saw in the past, what we "know" is there, and what we expect to see. This is "image merging" par excellence. Optical illusions are really mind illusions.

Painting, drawing, and modern digital picture-making replicates to a remarkable extent what happens automatically and involuntarily in our brains when we see the world. No one by effort of will can turn off this mental stitching, merging, and HDR-ing. It is no surprise that paintings, drawings, and digipix are so comforting, familiar, and popular. They flatter our perception of the world by merely reflecting back to us what we think we see.

To close here is a thought bomb: since we cannot, by effort of will, turn off the image processing that runs constantly in our minds the only way to see a sample of the world as it really is to make a photograph of it! Someone whose pictorial values emanate from painting and drawing, David Hockney perhaps, will always be disappointed when they look for those values in a photograph.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, every time I've seen Hockney's own photographs I was disappointed
in them. I'm even more disappointed in the current trend to paint with
Fauxtoshop. Seems like the Final Solution to actual objective photography.
I'd agree that sometimes a greater sense of reality can actually be conveyed (or implied) in a painting, given sufficient skill. So in that sense
I envy the really acute painters of various eras. But in many ways photog
presents are different set of challenges, with rewards of its own, which I
would rather take head on rather than dodge. Specifically, it demands
a somewhat different form of discovery. The hunt is often the greater reward than the kill, which doesn't come that often."Great" photographers are often defined by a handful of of significant shots over a lifetime.

[sepstein17]

Although photography freezes a moment in time, the reality of what we see is based on Maris's assertion that our expectations shape our vision. But what we think we see does not always translate into what we produce. Ever print a neg (w/o printing a contact sheet or contact print first) and are surprised with the content of the enlargement? I have and that's the mind saying hello -- "image processing" will never be an exact science. The mind is a powerful mechanism that still fills one with wonder -- painter and photographer alike.

[Michael Alpert]

Since the invention of electronic music, it has become impossible to do any creative work with acoustical instruments. Those old instruments go part of the way toward making layered music, but the little piece that's missing means everything. Yes, those rudimentary fiddles and pianos and what-nots are evidence of dull minds and nothing more. And now that we have iPads, writing poems with pencils has become a complete waste of time. Only people who are stuck in the ancient twentieth century would ever-ever write poems with pencils. And painting with paint . . . well, we who know what's what can only smile at all the old idiots in merry old England and elsewhere who still paint paintings and draw drawings.

[Michael Alpert]

It occurs to me that the ridiculous, immodest statement that I wrote late last night might actually be taken seriously. It was a joke, though what I wrote seems quite close to some of the pronouncements made by Sir David in his interview and some of the statements about traditional photography posted on this forum. Confusion about ends and means can become a source of myopia from which there is no easy exit. Yes, you can write poems with pencils, and you can make relevant contemporary art with cameras and film. To think otherwise would be truly idiotic.